Steam Workshop now allows creators to sell mods

Mods have often been considered to be an amazing feature for PC gaming and Steam has made adding mods to games much easier with it’s Steam Workshop. In the past mods have always been free for download, now however Steam is allowing community made content to be sold directly for certain Steam Workshop titles that have enabled this feature.

The Steam Workshop allows users to download user made content such as items, maps and mods. Creators who add their content to the Steam Workshop will now be able list their creation for sale at a price of their choosing or make their work available for free; the content that is bought by users will be immediately available for play.

This new feature debuts today with The Elder Scrolls V:Skyrim which currently has over 25,000 items for download in the Steam Workshop; over 170 million downloads for the game have taken place since it’s release in 2011 and all of the free mods, quests, weapons, items and other creations will still be available for users if the creators wish them to be.

With the announcement of the new feature Valve revealed that over $57 million has been paid to community content creators since the Steam Workshop emerged in 2011.

There’s no comments yet on how this system will be monitored especially as some mods are not compatible and others can be highly unstable and cause games to crash.

Recently Valve has been making changes to Steam mostly to increase security and combat phishing and scams. Level 0 users will no longer be able to add friends and will need to add a minimum of $5 to their ingame wallet or spend that much at least in the store before they can add other users; higher level users will still be able to find and add new users however.

I thought these were considered cheats though..especially in online multiplayer? Hey check out thegamerplaet.net for discounted games

Chupachup

Mods are by definition not cheats. That is not saying that mods do not exist that allow players to cheat. There are!

Most mods generally allow customization that enables increased playability through interface improvements or changes to character mechanics making them or their actions more fluid or seamless and in some cases mods add new levels and content to extend a games playable life.

Many games makers explicitly forbid the selling of any external content created by the player as it is based on a proprietary framework, namely the game itself, and can’t “exist” without that framework.

Another reason, that has been given in the past, is that mods are are created by and for the “community”. That community is grown through interest in the game and by extension through the subsequent growth of player generated content and usability tweaks.

In several cases, players in both Skyrim and World of Warcraft watched as generational mods disappeared due to one or more contributors not allowing the use of THEIR separately designed coding framework that had been the base or key component of a larger modding project.

To sell mods, some of which are based on or comprised of other original player generated content, opens a pandora’s box of who get’s what percentage of the profit (game publisher, project publisher or individual contributor). And what happens when community content generated by one player is used in the saleable content of another?

It use to be, you modded because you a) loved the game, b) could see a certain need for improvement and c) wanted to help people get more enjoyment out of the game, i.e., grow the community. Now, it’s about exploiting the games and the players for money.

All of this erects walls in the community thereby cheapening the experience of all players. Sad!